In the early '80s, BBSes were a source of piracy. Also, local user groups would share ir rent tapes of software ‘only to be used that month,’ with a wink and a nod.
In the mid-'80s, I was downloading…images from FTP sites around the world, and also assembling multi-part uuencoded files from Usenet.
This was all before the web, and It wasn’t new then.
The first known things pirated looks to have been software at some point in the 70’s.
Most music and video files were so large that actively sharing them back then wasn’t feasible for most people, though I’m sure many made it work even in those slow times. I remember the days of watching images load in one pixel layer at a time.
Napster was the first real breakout application specifically for getting pirated media, but people were definitely sharing movies, music, and anything else digital over IRC well before Napster popped into existence.
Watching “images” load…
I know what kind of man you are
You were also an enjoyer of the clickbaity “money tree” back in the day? Each pixel was a link to something (it was ads, it was entirely ads), but you might could win $10,000 or so it claimed.
Also I was using a 14.4 modem well after 56k and dsl/broadband were introduced and available to everyday consumers. Every webpage took a few minutes to load in for me in those days. It wasn’t until a bit after 2003 that I finally caught up with the times… it’s kind of amazing to think that my ping was manageable in Aliens vs Predator 2, and the first Call of Duty.
The first known things pirated looks to have been software at some point in the 70’s.
Are we gonna split hairs over ARPANET versus the Internet? For what was probably a couple of computer engineering students sharing a copy of Adventure between a couple of university VAX mainframes over an
SSHtelnet connection…😛
RSH, or more likely telnet, not SSH.
ah, you got me there!
fixed
Porn. It’s always porn.
You’re actually kinda right. My understanding is the very first jpg image was an unlicensed scan of a playboy centerfold (cropped to exclude the nudity). It was copied and redistributed all over the place, before the internet even existed and it wasn’t licensed, but was copyrighted.
5 1/4 Inch floppy disk copying and sharing would have been one of the first widespread examples.
alt.binaries newsgroups were an early place to get pictures or software online.
I discovered emulators in the mid 90s so the first thing I pirated was Harvest Moon and Final Fantasy 3 for the SNES since they didn’t ever carry these at stores near me to have ever bought them even if I had the money.
The first widely reported instsnce of software piracy was in 1975-1976 when a PC hobby group was distributing copies of newly founded Microsoft’s Altair BASIC. Go figure Microslop would be the first software company to do legal battle against piracy. 😒
Not sure, I have a background in the scene, but the first thing I remember pirating is Temple of Apshai for my VIC-20, however, I did have a Sinclair before that so I should have pirated something for that too.
I was a teenager when Napster launched. I remember doing a lot of Metallica. And then even more Metallica when they complained about it. And then even MORE when the flash cartoons came out for “Napster bad. Money goooooood”
I don’t know exactly what it was first. It was music obviously…but I remember just spending hours downloading stuff, a lot of humor songs too like the kicked my dog, Donald duck blow job, sesamea street etc.
No idea, but Lenna is probably one of the earlier images pirated over the internet given its history in testing image compression algorithms.
1998 - downloaded hundreds of Super Nintendo, arcade and neo geo rooms to play on an emulator. Used my university’s fast internet connection and a Zip drive to download hundreds of files. A year later got my very own ISDN line then began downloading MP3s and grainy movies. Seeing how the entertainment industry has deteriorated over the years, I don’t feel so guilty these days.
we were grabbin apps in the usenet binaries by the mid-late 80s
I remember pirated single by the Beatles in 1968
I don’t have a source for this but I believe the first internet-pirated item was software, although “pirated” might not be the proper label for it… I vaguely recall an article where the “fathers” of the TCP protocol sent a new revision of some new tcp code across the globe to a 3rd party who did not own the rights to that code somewhere in the 1970s so world wide connections could be tested.
If this does not fit the piracy label then I would not be surprised if Tim Berners-Lee would have used/linked to some imagery or document he didn’t have rights for on his first build websites when testing “his” World Wide Web invention.
Never a trust a Klingon.mp3
